


The Viper's Lily

by dreamsofghostsandstars



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Dream Sequence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:44:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7550146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsofghostsandstars/pseuds/dreamsofghostsandstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian Gray dreams about the women in his life. Written before season 3, and the first fic I ever published anywhere (originally on Tumblr). Disclaimer: I do not own <em>Penny Dreadful</em> or anything original to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Viper's Lily

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WynCatastrophe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WynCatastrophe/gifts).



In his waking hours, Dorian no longer composes letters to the dead, not even inside his own mind. What good would it do to feel guilt when one cannot ( _will not,_ whispers his conscience) change? To apologize for crimes one does not regret? He knows, deep down, that he would kill Basil again, as he killed Angelique so recently. The fear of his portrait’s discovery chains him as tightly as he has chained the entity inside it.

Sometimes he wonders why. He has the wealth and connections to flee London tomorrow, disguising the portrait’s concealment as the sarcophagus of a pharaoh with a caravan of guards, if he so chose. He could charm or intimidate any human he knows into giving him their fealty for long enough to build a new hidden chamber, a new castle, an entire cathedral dedicated to his beauty and built over the relic of his ugliness. He wonders if some part of the magic that binds him to that infernal creature compels his silence, and wants to rage against it and shout his secret to all of London in defiance; but he also fears that nothing is forcing his hand, nothing but what remains inside himself, nothing but the truth that, even as a human, he is a coward.

When waking, he can deceive himself. He should never sleep— in fact, he’s not quite sure he even feels what he used to consider “sleepy” anymore. The minion of Amun-Ra asserted itself in Dorian’s mind and body centuries ago, and the tie that holds him to it, even now, pulls its strength to him like lightning rushing down a kite string. He had to train his body to sleep again; he could effortlessly train it not to.

But in that murky hollow, where shapes twist into fantasies and truths and voices echo through the fog of lifetimes, he finds some piece of himself that he does not want to let go. Inspiration, beauty, horror, all the things that feed his waking soul thrive there. So he goes to it, again and again, and wakes up with memories that haunt him, that he must himself twist into fine ghost stories that he can control.

He is an elegant man, as everyone who counts in London has witnessed. Elegant and eloquent, his flourishes never too small to be noticed by those who should notice them, and never too grand to be appreciated by those with fine taste. The script on the letter that he sees is perfect, if a bit archaic, although he somehow sees both Basil and Angelique’s names in the same spot in the heading. One does not go to dreams for clarity, but for madness to end their boredom, and in the end, his life always comes back to boredom, does it not?

Once not. Once, he felt something entirely new and painful: Rejection. He cherishes that pain, even knowing he would sacrifice it in an instant to have Vanessa Ives return to him. They could have walked across the mortal world together, across the heads of the humans he adores and betrays, across the eons. She never told him what she was, but he senses immortality in her. He begged _her_ to uncover his secret, for only when he shares it with another like himself can he truly believe that there is a person in all the universe, in Earth and the planets, in Heaven and Hell, that he can trust: That, for all his sins and all his hideousness, he always contained a germ that could become love.

Basil’s eyes flash at him, the eyes of his first lover, and they eyes of the first person to hate him. Basil saw the portrait for a demon, perhaps saw it more clearly for living in a time when people went to the stake for sacrifices and Sabbats that never even happened. And in that glance is everything Dorian, immortal, coward, murderer, runs from now, through blood and crypts. He will never be one with a human; he could reign over them as king if he wanted, but he will never be a friend, a lover, a spouse, not as he truly is. In the truth are only difference and distance. He saw that look again in Angelique’s face, before poisoning her and making the only difference that mattered the one between living and dead.

 _My dearest_ and here the name could be any of a dozen, and is somehow all of them,

_You are beautiful in death, august as an emperor in your absence. Pale and bloodless, you are, pale as ivory, and the blood in my veins carries the red memories of our days and nights. Does it shock you, in the Hell your God ordains for all those who live as we did together— in presence at least—, that I delight in your beauty now? Aren’t corpses supposed to be repulsive things? In a few minutes you will cool; your blood will pool in strange places; you will be disgusting indeed. But you see, I have triumphed. When you were alive, I was monstrous to you. Now that you are a monster and I am lovely, I have triumphed. And I shiver with that beauty._

Cold hits him and clammy hands grasp his arms; his gut turns as though he writhed on the Dragon’s stake. He knew people who witnessed that slaughter, and knows that he deserves to be one of them.

The letter changes, he does not know to whom he writes it, and now it is in an archaic font, as old as the one he practiced as a young man:

_I do not deserve it! I am immortal, I am the demon and flesh, I am greater than anyone I have killed! I have snapped chickens’ bones and sucked the marrow, when I was poor and hungry; I had the right to snap your neck and drink in safety!_

The dream changes again, and there is no letter. He stands in the gray valley of his dreams. He knows it is a graveyard, too, but not whether it is where his hopes or his victims lie. He does not look at his hands, yet sees that they are purpling from the damp cold.

The woman appears, the ever-living one who is dead already. He does not love her, he thinks. She is not Vanessa Ives. He was meant for Vanessa Ives, and the beautiful soul rejected him.

But as she approaches, naked, clad only in the whiteness of her undeath, his skin warms. He wonders if his waking body is swelling and flushed. In the real world, he will seek her out again and again and again, until he breaches the mystery or this new equal rejects him too.

He knows the symbolism of her name. It is surely why she picked it when she slithered out of the sad skin that was “Brona.” He thinks that she may have a hundred identities, a thousand; perhaps she bears within her a god worshipped from ancient Egypt to modern Japan; but he loves this name, for she is a flower of inhumanity.

Where did the lily come from? She reaches out to him, barely far enough, the pink in the lily’s heart reminiscent of her lifeless and deathless lips and nipples and the darker petals that curve outward, just visible, from her vulva, dressed in curling hairs more beautiful than cloth of gold. He wonders if that is her true heart, if immortals find their true souls in a locus of sensation.

He takes the flower, brushing her fingers. They feel like ice, and yet they warm him. He is like no other men, none that he has found.

_"Lily.”_


End file.
